Tuesday, September 20, 2016

John of Orange Gets His Gold Watch

Nothing screams "American Dream" louder than the Totally True Story of a humble, weepy booze-hound Ohio who, by working hard and selling his soul off a piece at a time, rose from being a mere tobacco lobbyist bag man --

Nearly a year after leaving office, John Boehner, the former Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is joining Squire Patton Boggs, the firm announced Tuesday.

The 66-year-old Boehner will act as a strategic advisor to the firm’s clients and will focus on global business development, according to Squire Patton. He will not act as a lobbyist, the firm said.

“I left the private sector and got into public service decades ago because I wanted to help remove government barriers to economic growth and job creation, and that’s still the mission that drives me,” Boehner said in a statement, praising the “world-class team” at Squire Patton.

...

During the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Boehner was a featured guest at a private reception at the firm’s Cleveland office along with Trent Lott, the former Senate Majority Leader who is a lobbyist for Squire Patton. Boehner will be reuniting with his former chief of staff and longtime aide David Schnittger, who joined the firm as a senior policy adviser in January 2015.

Boehner stepped down from his Speaker position in October 2015, after struggling to manage increasing discord within his party. He has kept a relatively low profile since leaving Capitol Hill. Earlier this month Reynolds American Inc., the parent company of cigarette maker RJR Reynolds, announced that Boehner had joined its board.

The hiring is coup for Squire Patton, which has been through some rocky patches since the 2014 merger of Squire Sanders and Patton Boggs, especially on its lobbying and government affairs side.

...

The benefits package is rumored to be lavish: unlimited travel, a carton of smokes and a fifth of Johnny Walker Blue on his porch every morning, and a security cordon with instructions to taser the shit out of Mike Lee or Ted Cruz or Mark Meadows or any other Freedumb Caucus fuck who gets within a 1,000 feet of Squire Patton's newest underboss.

You have to love the name "Squire Patton Boggs" - sounds like the "Upper Class Twit of the Year" satirized so perfectly by Monty Python; the sort of enormously fat old school English landed aristocrat who is used to running everything and now is enraged like Enoch Powell (google "rivers of blood" if you want an eyeful) about the evils of "unrestricted immigration". It's weird how 50 years can pass and everything can change, but on the right wing it's always 1968 and nothing whatever has changed.

Yeah, at first I saw "squire" and thought Mr. Glass was doing some witty Arthurian reference. Then I kept reading. Did someone just out-Reince-Priebus Reince Priebus as far as names that scream, "My parents didn't know anyone but rich people when they named me!"?